Abstract
In a bilingual Stroop task, we examined between-language interference among proficient Japanese— English bilingual speakers. Participants named ink colors either in Japanese or in English. The Japanese color terms were either phonologically similar to (i.e., loan words) or dissimilar from (i.e., traditional color terms) English color terms. For both response languages, a significant between-language Stroop effect was found despite the orthographic dissimilarity between the languages. The magnitude of the between-language interference was larger with the phonologically similar terms. These findings implicate direct links connecting phonologically similar matching words in the lexicons of proficient bilingual speakers of dissimilar languages and imply that phonological processing in lexical access occurs even when the access is done unintentionally.
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This research was supported in part by Army Research Institute Contracts DASW01-99-K-0002 and DASW01-03-K-0002 to the University of Colorado (A.F.H., principal investigator; Lyle E. Bourne, Jr., co-principal investigator). Support was also provided by an award from the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado to H.S. This study was described in a paper at the 73rd Annual Convention of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association in Denver, Colorado, on April 12, 2003.
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Sumiya, H., Healy, A.F. Phonology in the bilingual Stroop effect. Memory & Cognition 32, 752–758 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195865
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195865